Adams Mark Hotel Dallas, Texas, USA

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• Adams Mark HotelDallas, Texas, USA

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• Virtual Reference Services
• In
• Multilingual Environments
• by
• Yuhfen Diana Wu
• San Jose State University
• San Jose, California 95192-0028

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Virtual Reference ServicesIn Multilingual
Environments

• Other presenters
• Susan McGlamery
• Manager at OCLC
• Alma Ortega
• University of San Diego

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WWW and Internet Users

• Diversity of Internet users -
• 71 non-English users
• More then 50 are non-English contents
• Numbers of Internet user are growing daily about
  394 millions in Asia , 308 millions in Europe,
  207 millions in the USA, and about 83 millions in
  Latin America
• (http//www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm )

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Culture of the Internet Users

• Instant response
• Multi-tasking
• Virtual social community, such as MySpace,
  YouTube, FaceBook sharing information in the
  cyberspace

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Expectations from Library Users

• Instant answer, 24x7 around the clock without
  geographical limitations
• Services in the language they are familiar with
• Resources in the language they are familiar with

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Multilingual Virtual Reference Collaborations

• In the United States
• QuestionPoint offers English, Spanish, and other
  languages
• New York Suffolk Library in English, Spanish and
  Chinese
• Multi-national Collaborations
• Follow the Sun HelpDesk
• by London School of Economics
• (UK, Australia, and U.S.A.)
• Regional in Spain and Portugal

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Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
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SJLibarary Online Catalog in English, Chinese,
Spanish, and Vietnamese
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Chinese Home Pageby Yahoo and Google
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Google Language Tools
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ProQuest in Multiple Languages
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OCLC FirstSearch in Multiple Languages
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Approaches and Solutions for Multilingual
Information Retrieval

• Dictionary-based
• Corpus-based
• Hybrid or knowledge-based
• Human interactions

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Expectations

• Ease of use for users
• Outcome to be accurate
• Real-time retrieval around the clock
• Cost effectiveness for provider

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Technical Difficulties

• Inter-operability among diverse operating systems
  and applications
• Lack of standard in encoding
• Complexity and irregularity among languages

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Google Language Translation
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AltaVista Language Translation
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Live Reference Services in Chinese at Suffolk
County Library, New York
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Live Reference Services in Spanish at San Jose
Library via AskNow, California
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Support for Localization
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Voice over IP
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Our Challenges

• Challenges for virtual reference services in
  multilingual environments
• Technical development and supports
• Staff qualifications and training
• Quality control and assessment
• Policies

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Two photographs taken in Essaouira, Morocco

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VIRTUAL REALITY
Resources in all formats and languages
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Question Answers

• PowerPoint available at
• http//www.sjsu.edu/dwu/presentations
• Yuhfen Diana Wu
• Diana.wu_at_sjsu.edu
• 408-808-2087